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State of the Blog
Recently, Steven den Beste updated his blogroll, then commented on the negative economy of scale and inverse network effect that allows his blogroll to be very valuable to those who are included. Naturally, given the value of those links, he gets a lot of mail from people asking to be put on the list. The reason he doesn't do so is that the list would get very long and unwieldy (and thus the value of said link would go down), and also because "Sturgeon's Law is in full force in the blogosphere: 90% of blogs are crap, if not an even higher proportion than that. (Not yours, of course.)"

I thought about that for a moment, and I realized that my blog is crap, part of that 90%. Not (I hope) because the content is low quality, but because it is so infrequently and inconsistently updated. At which point, I began examining what I'm doing here, why I'm doing it, and how I should proceed. I have not been very productive over the last year. There are many reasons for this, most of which contribute to my lack of motivation to produce more posts. One major factor in my lack of motivation is the fact that only a handful of people (if that) will ever actually see them, thus making the decision to blow off the blog that much easier.

I've been doing this for close to 3 years, and it has never really caught on. For a long time, I posted nearly every day. I didn't worry about my lack of readership because I enjoyed what I was doing. And whatever feedback I did get was gratifying. Then things began to slow down, and now I'm stuck in a negative feedback loop where I don't even want to be linked anymore because I don't create enough high-quality content. But I don't create enough high-quality content because I don't have enough people visiting!

It's more complicated than that, of course, but that is the general idea. I still enjoy doing the weblog, I just don't do it enough. Even when I do, I'm terribly inconsistent. However, I think this is something I can correct. What I'm going to try to do is post at least once a week, on Sundays (anything beyond that is just gravy). Hopefully, being on a regular schedule will force me to consistently churn out worthwhile material. I also need to start creating more original high-quality content, as opposed to just linking to it (as I mostly do now). This will probably be a gradual thing, as I begin to comment more on what I link to. And thus I hope to bootstrap myself into superstardom. Or maybe just a few additional readers.

This post is part of the Kaedrin Weblog. It's been categorized under Weblogs and was originally published in May 2003.

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